Tentacle-Free Anime: "Kanon" (2006) Review

Love stories are hard to pull off because you need to make the characters likeable, you need to make your viewers care about them in the first place, and you need to make sure the story doesn't feel too cliché or stale. I like a good love story. I do. I like that good feeling in my heart when I see someone, even a fictional character, finally end up happy. The journey can't be all about picking daisies though, eventually something bad will happen. “Hurt your babies,” as some writers will tell you, and I wholly agree. That doesn't mean watching them get hurt is any less painful. I thought I was able to handle my fair share of stories like that, but Kanon was the story that almost broke me.

Summary:Yuichi Aizawa returns to this city after seven years. In his childhood, he often visited it, but something happened in the past which caused him to block out his memories of the events of seven years ago. On the day after he gets settled in, he meets a girl carrying a backpack with wings on it. Her name is Tsukimiya Ayu and he begins to recall the memories he had lost.[AnimeNewsNetwork.com]

When I first decided to watch Kanon, it was directly after re-watching that old classic space horse that never quits: Firefly/Serenity by Joss Whedon. I had wanted to watch something a little more low-key, but also I wasn't feeling up to reading subtitles at the time. I hadn't watched a slice of life show in quite a while, and Kanon honestly seemed rather harmless. My exact words before starting it: “I can handle feels after feels after feels, no problem.” And about a little over halfway through the anime I almost rage quit. Not because it was bad, but because I was legitimately eating my words.

Kanon promo image

This is Kanon. And it is feels after feels after feels. Fair warning.

When going into this series, the first thing you'll notice is the character designs are on the ‘’little girl’’, moe side of things. It's supposed to be cute and misleading. The second thing you'll notice is that this is going to be a harem series. A guy meets a lot of girls, and eventually all of them want to date him. Well, that makes sense, Kanon is based off of a visual novel – which in Japan is a genre of games where you play as a protagonist in a “choose your adventure” style game and you can complete different routes which will result in happy and sad endings.

And Kanon proves that it will not let its VN status dictate how the story is told, and instead chooses to tell the story of these girls and Yuichi in arcs. So that you have time to meet all of them, get to know them, and let their kind personalities seep into you until tragedy strikes. Each girl has a tragic back story, or something tragic happens to them in the show, but none of these are played off for obvious shock value that makes you go “but of course that would happen!” Instead each instance tries to feel meticulously planned out and the creators attempt to make them natural to the story; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't as much. There's actually only one instance that doesn't feel wholly natural, and it's the one where I almost quit. It involves one of the most untouchable characters of the show, and I'm not going to spoil.

Don't make this woman angry.

There are plenty of subplots that run throughout the series as well, one of them being a major revelation that involves the young-looking Ayu. I won't spoil that either, but when the revelation comes, it hits hard. Although sadly, it's not the best handled revelation of the series. There are a few instances when I felt it could've been done better, and not spread out through the last remaining episodes like it was. That being said, the ending is quite the breath of fresh air after what is basically “A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Anime”.I guess what Kanon does right is setting up its many characters, and allowing you to feel for them. What it does wrong is not all of the revelations are handled with pure grace and a few of them feel forced or slightly out of place in the overall grand scheme of the series. This isn't Kanon's folly though, as overall the series is really solid and it's hard to find anything bad to say about it. If I had to fish anymore, it's that the characters of Ayu and Mai feel the most annoying. One talks a little too much, and the other talks so very little. And after awhile both tropes get a bit on my nerve, however no one is outright stupid in this show. Ayu is a little bit, but we do get an explanation for why that is. And all the characters talk very openly and straightforward about things – and I always like that in a show.

Mai is ready to go, bro.

The animation isn't the greatest, the eyes in Kanon are even bigger than usual anime eyes and obviously for a lot of people it's going to be the biggest turn off when deciding if they want to watch the show or not. I'm not sure why they chose to go with this animation style, but it's there and we gotta live with it. The music in Kanon is very melancholy and fits the series well, it builds on the name of the series by making the main theme a canon – it's a style of melody that continues to grow as it goes on. The dub really isn't half bad, and is actually a real treat because during a lot of the fun parts you can just feel the voice actors having a lot of fun with it. They know not a lot of people will check out Kanon, so during those parts they get to take liberties and have a blast making the fun parts really fun.

Kanon, despite being a slice of life, is a real rush of emotions. Because it takes its time to develop the characters and their sense of relationship with the audience, as well as with Yuichi – who I haven't talked about at all, and really there's not a lot to say other than I was incredibly surprised with how endearing a character he really is. He's both a little shit and an amazingly kind person all rolled into one, he's very similar to Kyosuke from Oreimo. Kanon lets you care for the characters. And that's smart writing, and that makes Kanon a smart show.

The subtitle says it all.

There is an original 2003 version of the series, but I've never seen it. My review is based off of the 2006 remake. This isn't a “manly” show, but it doesn't have to be. It's great for what it is, and it's inherently better than most story material out there. But not better than Firefly/Serenity by Joss Whedon.